Jon Wilkman Discusses His New Book at the Newhall Library

 Floodpath: The Deadliest Man Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles.
The Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society will be hosting Jon Wilkman, who will give a talk on his new book about the St. Francis Dam disaster:
“Floodpath: The Deadliest Man Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles”. The talk will be given at 2 p.m. on Saturday, February 27, at the Old Town Newhall Library, 24500 Main Street, in Newhall.
A visionary and controversial quest for water made modern Los Angeles possible.  But the failure of the St. Francis Dam on March 12, 1928, the worst American civil engineering failure of the 20th century, was a horrific reminder of human limits — a lesson that is all but forgotten today.  In Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles, Jon Wilkman, an Emmy-Award winning documentary filmmaker and author of books about Los Angeles, revisits a deluge that claimed nearly 500 lives.  Based on more than 20 years of research and driven by eyewitness accounts, combining urban history and life-and-death drama with a technological detective story, Wilkman’s narrative reads like a thriller, grounded on historical fact.  Floodpath will be published by Bloomsbury Press on January 5, 2016.
“Documentary filmmaker Jon Wilkman gracefully combines engineering explanations and a who’s who of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles elites with a riveting account of what is called the deadliest man-made disaster in America during the twentieth century.  The man at the center of the story, no nonsense William Mulholland, rose from a ditch digger to become the man in charge of meeting the thirsty city’s growing need for water in the face of litigation and even downright violence. While Wilkman recounts Mulholland’s career and the context surrounding the construction of the dam, he hits his stride with a detailed narrative of its violent collapse, a disaster that unleashed a firestorm of criticism and questions only partially answered by an emotion coroner’s inquest.  While the massive disaster may have been largely forgotten, its foundation in both hubris and opportunism remains relevant today.
Booklist
“Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Jon Wilkman, offers a well-researched account of a little-remembered California tragedy.  He tells the dramatic story in the context of the rapidly growing city, whose ceaseless need for water had until then been met by the legendary, self-trained civil engineer William Mulholland (1855-1935), who managed the city’s water system for 50 years.  An iconic, sometimes arrogant figure, Mulholland had supervised the building of the Owens River Aqueduct (1913), which gave rise to modern L.A.  At 72, he created yet another expansion of the city’s water system with construction of the St. Francis Dam, which he deemed safe.  Drawing on archives and interviews with survivors, Wilkman re-creates the disaster, its huge flow of “rocks, mud, debris, and mangled bodies,” and the stories of victims stripped naked by the flooding waters.  The author also details the ensuing search-and-recovery efforts as well as the many investigations into the disaster’s suspected causes, which range from landslides to deliberate dynamiting.  A coroner’s jury refused to indict Mulholland, who accepted blame for the disaster and retired, a broken man.
The Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society is pleased to present Jon Wilkman at the Old Town Newhall Library! The general public is welcome. Admission will be free.
For more information on this and other upcoming programs from the SCVHS, please call Alan Pollack at 661-254-1275 and visit www.scvhs.org.